The FBI has some strange ideas about how to “update” federal surveillance laws: They’re calling for legislation to penalize online services that provide users with too much security.

I’m not kidding. The proposal was revealed in The Washington Post last week — and a couple days ago, a front-page story in The New York Times reported the Obama administration is preparing to back it.

Why? Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI have long feared their wiretap capabilities would begin “going dark” as criminals and terrorists — along with ordinary citizens — shift from telephone networks, which are required to be wiretap-ready under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), to the dizzying array of online communications platforms available today.

While it’s not yet clear how dire the going-dark scenario really is, the statutory “cure” proposed by the FBI — with fines starting at $25,000 a day for companies that aren’t wiretap capable — would surely be worse than the disease.

The FBI’s misguided proposal would impose costly burdens on thousands of companies (and threaten to entirely kill those whose business model centers on providing highly secure encrypted communications), while making cloud solutions less attractive to businesses and users. It would aid totalitarian governments eager to spy on their citizens while distorting business decisions about software design. Perhaps worst of all, it would treat millions of law-abiding users with legitimate security needs as presumed criminals — while doing little to hamper actual criminals.

As Amazon remains at loggerheads with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over its Prime Air drone delivery service, the online retail giant has taken its operations north of the border to develop its technology with greater regulatory freedom. A report in The Guardian on Monday revealed that the company has been testing its drones for the last few months at a top secret site in British Columbia, Canada.

Since Amazon first revealed its Prime Air project in 2013, a service that would see packages under 5 lb (11 lb) dropped at the doors of customers within 30 minutes, progress has been slow. While the FAA has handed out exemptions to companies looking to use drones as part of their business operations, it wasn't until this month that the FAA finally granted the company an "experimental airworthiness certificate," enabling it to put its drones to the test.

The problem was, however, that the approval only pertained to a certain model of drone. A drone that Amazon says had since been improved upon and had become obsolete. In response, Amazon's vice president of Global Public Policy Paul Misener revealed that the snail-like progress of the agency had compelled the company to begin testing more advanced models abroad. But where exactly this had been taking place, and just how close to US airspace, was not known until now.

French-US vendor Alcatel-Lucent has been enlisted by Verizon Communications to overhaul its ultra-longhaul network. Alca-Lu’s 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) will be used for the carrier’s ultra-longhaul, core optical network; the converged wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM)/optical transport network (OTN)/packet-based platform will assist with Verizon’s transition to an optical converged infrastructure.

In addition, the new hardware will help Verizon to quickly adjust wavelength connections, automate tasks on a wide scale and identify and route around faults in its fibre infrastructure.

Further, Alca-Lu claims that its system can help operators such as Verizon to maintain costs by allowing them to scale wavelengths from 100Gbps to 200Gbps and beyond, without having to change existing equipment.

I’m working on a County-by-County look at the State of Broadband in MN. My hope is to feature a county a day (in alphabetical order). In November, Connect Minnesota released their final report on broadband availability. Here is how Lyon County stacked up:

Household Density: 14.2

Number of Households: 10,227

Percentage serviced (without mobile): 4.14%

Percentage serviced (with mobile): 4.14%

Lyon County is clearly in bad shape when it comes to broadband. Or there’s something very strange about how the numbers were collected.

When I look up addresses in the area it looks like there are a few providers: Arvig, Charter, Frontier MVTV Wireless but none of them must be serving the whole area. I know MVTV is always looking to expand; maybe that offers possibility for the community. We have seen counties with lower population density encourage providers to come into the area. But at this point I haven’t seen or heard of much development (adoption or deployment) happening in the area. Although I’d be delighted to hear that I’m wrong and there are efforts in motion.

My hope is that these county-specific posts will help policy makers and county residents understand where they stand in terms of broadband access. Assuming it might get forwarded to folks who don’t eat and sleep broadband I wanted to provide a little background on broadband to help set the stage…

Consumers of over-the-top (OTT) video don’t have a lot of patience when it comes to the performance of content delivery systems, according to an inaugural market survey and report from Conviva, which specializes in optimization of the online video experience.

According to Conviva’s “How Consumers Judge Their Viewing Experience: The Business Implications of Sub-Par OTT Service,” nearly three-quarters of all OTT video viewers give up on OTT video viewing within the first four minutes if they experience “stream interruptions, inadequate picture fidelity and other poor streaming experience issues.”

The FCC is poised to adopt a spectrum sharing plan that could make 150 MHz of spectrum available for wireless broadband on a nearly nationwide basis. The spectrum lies in the 3550-3700 MHz band currently used by army and navy radar in limited geographic areas, and military users would continue to have priority access to the spectrum, explained senior FCC officials on a conference call with reporters Friday.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is circulating a draft of a report and order that would formalize many of the 3550-3700 MHz spectrum sharing recommendations made by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2012. The commission is expected to vote on the report and order next month.

According to the FCC officials, the plan calls for a three-tier system with incumbent military users having priority access to the spectrum, a second tier of licenses made available through an auction and a lower tier that would be available for unlicensed use. Users in each tier would be prohibited from interfering with users in higher tiers. Officials declined to say what portion of the band would be auctioned.

One important change since PCAST made its original recommendations is that plans now call for smaller exclusion zones for military users along coastlines and around army training bases. Those zones now are 77% smaller than they were in initial recommendations. For example, zones around army training bases initially would have had a 60 kilometer radius but new recommendations call for zones with radiuses of just three kilometers, officials said.

The Denver Post notes that Google Fiber has filed a business registration with the Colorado secretary of state.

For what it's worth, Google Fiber says this doesn't necessarily mean that Denver will ultimately become a Google Fiber launch location. "We don't have any current plans to expand to additional cities beyond our current potential Fiber cities," Google said in a statement. "We love that people are excited about Fiber, but we have to start somewhere — we have a lot of work to do before we can talk about additional expansion plans."

Last week the company added Salt Lake City to its growing list of markets that include Raleigh/Durham, Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta, Kansas City, Provo and Austin.

The explosion of interest in community-owned fiber on the part of elected officials and technology leaders has created an opportunity that few have noticed: cities could leverage these investments to help lower the barriers to home Internet access that still keep low-income, less educated and older citizens out of the digital mainstream. This could be easily accomplished, at it would cost cities practically nothing.

Here’s how: cities could allow neighboring households and community groups to share that terrific bandwidth – and its cost – by using community-owned fiber to power grassroots Wi-Fi networks.

Almost all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and community-owned fiber networks employ Terms of Service language that prohibits customers from extending their networks across property lines to share access with their neighbors. City-owned networks can expand the possibilities for affordable broadband access in disadvantaged neighborhoods simply by changing their Terms of Service to allow network sharing.

As demonstrated by the rise of Google Fiber, the advent of city-owned networks selling 100 megabit or gigabit Internet access for $75, $90 or $100 a month raises the competitive ante on broadband speed and price for traditional cable and telecommunications ISPs. This is great news for tech-savvy middle- and upper-income residents, as well as for data-dependent businesses and community anchor institutions like libraries and hospitals.

But in many city neighborhoods, we’re faced with the stubborn fact that large numbers of mostly low-income citizens still don’t have home Internet access at any speed.

The American Community Survey for 2013 reports data for 575 U.S. “places” with more than 15,000 households. 282 of these communities – nearly half – reported no fixed broadband connections (defined as any connection beyond dial-up or mobile) in at least 30 percent of their homes. 151 reported that at least one fourth of their households have no home Internet access of any kind – no dial-up, no mobile access; nothing. Not surprisingly, these Internet-free households are concentrated in low-income neighborhoods where residents are least able to afford the $30, $40 or $50 monthly cost of an Internet service subscription.

Of course, low-income households that can’t afford current DSL or cable Internet services have little to gain from the availability of fiber broadband service that costs twice as much.

AT&T today launched its gigabit fiber Internet service in parts of Cupertino, California, but the price isn't as good as it is in cities where AT&T faces competition from Google Fiber.

Google Fiber and AT&T's U-verse with GigaPower compete head-to-head in Kansas City and Austin. In those cities, AT&T matches Google's $70-per-month price for gigabit service, as long as you opt in to a program that lets AT&T watch your Web browsing and serve up personalized ads.

But AT&T charges more when it doesn't have to compete against Google. In Cupertino, AT&T said today it will offer "Internet speeds up to 1Gbps starting as low as $110 a month, or speeds at 300Mbps as low as $80 a month, with a one-year price guarantee." Despite being $40 more than AT&T's price for the same gigabit service in Kansas City and Austin, the Cupertino offer still requires opting in to the Internet usage monitoring.

Google has tentative plans for fiber service in nearby San Jose but hasn't announced a decision yet.

In Dallas, another city where AT&T doesn't have to compete against Google, it charges $120 a month for gigabit service. (Correction: AT&T recently changed the price from $120 to $110 a month.)

In North Carolina, AT&T reportedly dropped pricing from $120 to $70 after Google announced plans to expand into that state.

CenturyLink says that in Utah and other communities where it is deploying its 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) service, it is gaining strong traction with local school districts and residential users who telecommute for major corporations like eBay and Microsoft.

While bringing 1 Gbps broadband service to residential customers is a key focus for CenturyLink, the service provider is finding that schools represent a large market that's in dire need of higher speeds.

Within the state of Utah, the service provider has been able to serve a large majority of the state's schools with the 1 Gbps service.

"If you think in terms of the whole Utah state from Logan down to St. George and everywhere between there, we have deployed gig to the schools," said Jeremy Ferkin, vice president of Utah operations for CenturyLink, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "What's deployed in Utah is radically unique and probably the first in the globe of what's available for bandwidth to all of the schools."

Besides serving school districts with 1 Gbps service, CenturyLink has seen the growth of telecommuting in Utah among those who live in apartment complexes that are taking advantage of the service where it is available.

"We have a ton of work-at-home people and we have businesses where we go on their campus and help them with their recruiting by guiding where their employees can go in an MDU," Ferkin said. "A lot of them are actually guiding employees to go to where we have a Gig."

Ferkin added that telecommuters can use the high speed service to get a better experience with key business applications such as VPN and videoconferencing.

When vandals sliced a fiber-optic cable in the Arizona desert outside of Flagastaff last month, they did more than time-warp thousands of people back to an era before computers, credit cards or even phones.

They exposed a glaring vulnerability in the nation's Internet infrastructure: no backup systems in many places.

Because Internet service is largely unregulated by the federal government and the states, decisions about network reliability are left to the service providers.

Industry analysts say these companies generally do not build alternative routes, or redundancies, unless they believe it is worthwhile financially.

The result: While most major metropolitan areas in the U.S. have backup systems, some smaller cities and many rural areas do not.

"The more rural the location, the more likely that there's only one road in and out of that location," said Sean Donelan, a former infrastructure security manager in the U.S. Homeland Security Department who now works for a cybersecurity firm. "If someone manages to cut that fiber, you'll generally see a one- or two- or three-day outage."

Despite its own warnings about such vulnerabilities two decades ago, the federal government has taken no steps to require Internet companies to have backup systems, even as it has provided billions of dollars in subsidies to expand broadband Internet into unserved areas.

"Our first responsibility is to make sure that people actually have service," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, co-chairman of President Barack Obama's newly created Broadband Opportunity Council.

In northern Arizona last month, tens of thousands of residents were without Internet service — some for up to 15 hours — after vandals cut through an underground bundle of fiber-optic cables owned by CenturyLink. ATMs went down, stores couldn't process credit cards, college students in Flagstaff had to put their research on hold, and even 911 emergency service was lost.

If you want a fibre optic cable – the latest, hottest connection to the internet – brace yourself for some surprises.

When Eric Rosenquist and his wife were downsizing from their sprawling, rural acreage, they had a few items on their wish list.

For Rosenquist, a software engineer with between 30 and 40 devices in his home connected to the web, a strong, fast internet connection was essential.

He found that in Richardson Ridge, a housing development still under construction in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata.

"Being a newer neighbourhood, Bell wired it with fibre right into the home," says Rosenquist, "so it's great, because you've got the most modern type of conductivity."

But there's a downside. Because Bell laid down the fibre to the home (FTTH), they're not obligated to open it to third parties.

"So if I want internet service — or any service — over that fibre line, it has to be from Bell," says Rosenquist.

For years, the big telcos and cable companies have been compelled to allow their competitors access to their copper and coaxial networks. But Bell, Rogers and Telus have been upgrading their networks to fibre optic technology, and if you want that high-speed cable coming directly into your home, you have to go with one of the Big Three.

The fight over FTTH (some call it FTTP or Fibre-to-the-premises) is now before the CRTC, with many of the same arguments for access being presented by both sides.

In its presentation to the CRTC, Bell says it only builds the final leg, or fibre drop, to the home when a customer subscribes. It says that represents up to a third of the capital costs. Bell says opening up those lines to wholesale access would deter investment.

"Those who invest in facilities would be forced to incur capital expenditures purely for the benefit of their competitors," Bell says. "Expanding mandated access rules threatens to create or accentuate a digital divide, where only some Canadians benefit from a competitive choice of next generation networks. That would be an unfortunate outcome."

CRTC rules that forced the Big Three to share their wiring paved the way for independent service providers such as Start Communications, TekSavvy, VMedia and a host of others to offer internet, phone and TV service, often at lower prices than the Big Three.

But these smaller providers say without access to FTTH, they can't compete.

Hungry for a bigger piece of the Internet of things market, IBM will invest US$3 billion over four years to establish a new business unit dedicated to providing IoT systems and services to enterprises.

“We’re only at the very beginning of an amazing revolution. If we thought we were dealing with big data now, we haven’t seen anything yet,” said Erick Brethenoux, IBM director of analytics.

IBM General Manager Chris O’Connor will oversee the new unit, which will initially court enterprises in travel, logistics, insurance, public utilities, transportation and retail, Brethenoux said.

IBM will also tailor a new cloud service, the IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform, providing a way for enterprises to build their own data-driven systems, Brethenoux said. Over time, it will also develop specialized packages for specific fields like the insurance industry.

IBM will offer a customized section of its Bluemix platform service, to be called the Bluemix IoT Zone, where developers will be able to create specialized business logic to handle and analyze data streaming from IoT devices and sensors.

It will also work with partner companies in a range of industries to align more closely in all aspects of IoT, from hardware to data. It has signed deals with AT&T, chip design company ARM, and semiconductor manufacturer Semtech.

Another partner is the Weather Company, which will provide access to a rich trove of data to it can be ingested by other systems. Predictive maintenance systems could use weather records and predictions to determine when equipment needs to be serviced, for instance.

By 2021, as many as 28 billion IoT devices will be installed around the world, IDC has estimated. General Electric has predicted that IoT systems will add up to $15 trillion to global annual Gross Domestic Product over the next 20 years.

IoT is just the latest area IBM is targeting to breath new life into its business, which has been struggling as sales from some of its traditional on-premises products, particularly hardware, decline. Just last month it said it would invest $4 billion in cloud, mobile and analytics technologies.

IBM General Manager Chris O’Connor will oversee the new unit, which will initially court enterprises in travel, logistics, insurance, public utilities, transportation and retail. - IBM will also tailor a new cloud service, the IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform, providing a way for enterprises to build their own data-driven systems,. Over time, it will also develop specialized packages for specific fields like the insurance industry.

There is no shortage of interest in mobile health applications, which span everything from pedometers to Wi-Fi-enabled pacemakers, but what happens with all that data?

The New American Foundation, a Washington think tank, waded into that debate with a pair of recent panel discussions where experts acknowledged that the security risks around health IT systems are high, and the medical profession, as a whole, has a ways to go to get its cyber house in order.

Kevin Fu, who directs the Archimedes Research Center for Medical Device Security at the University of Michigan, argues that within the medical community -- as in many other industries -- there is a broad lack of awareness about basic cybersecurity practices, often enabling garden-variety malware to infiltrate systems that house sensitive data.

"Medical professionals are not too different from every other person in the country when it comes to cybersecurity hygiene. So they're taught to wash their hands in between patient encounters, but they're not taught as well as to the cybersecurity hygiene. I'd say we have a very long way to go," Fu says. "The bar is very low right now."

The glut of health data being generated and collected by mobile devices and applications also raises some significant privacy concerns, particularly when that information is outside of the scope of HIPAA and other federal statutes governing personal information.

"I think the key risk that we have is that we will create a pool of extremely sensitive health data that is totally unregulated and that is shared broadly without our knowledge and used in ways that we do not know," says Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University.

Cuba is aiming to increase internet access to 50% of its households by 2020, while boosting penetration of mobile telephony services to 60%, Reuters cites a senior US State Department official as saying.

‘There’s real potential here if there’s a real will on the Cuban side … As long as the Cubans create an environment that’s attractive to investment … and attractive to the delivery of services, I believe those services will reach the island,’ he said, adding: ‘They are falling behind, and that’s denying their people access to knowledge and to the opportunity to grow as an economy and as a people, and they’re aware of that.’

At the end of 2014 Cuba had roughly 2.5 million mobile phone users, translating to a wireless penetration of around 22%, one of the lowest rates in the world, notes TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database.

Access to the internet, meanwhile, is currently restricted and available only with government permission, with broadband infrastructure virtually non-existent.

T&T Mobility plans to start deploying 2.3GHz Wireless Communications Services (WCS) spectrum for Long Term Evolution (LTE) use commencing this summer, according to Tom Keathley, senior vice president of network and product planning.

In an interview with Fierce Wireless, Mr Keathley revealed that the rollout will commence in the coming months and continue into 2016. The spectrum will primarily be used to add extra capacity to AT&T’s network and will be deployed in densely populated, urban areas.

According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, August 2012 saw AT&T agree a deal worth up to USD600 million to acquire San Diego-based spectrum holding company NextWave Wireless, a major holder of 2.3GHz WCS frequencies. The deal effectively combined the nation’s two largest WCS spectrum holders (AT&T being the largest).

Subsequently, May 2014 saw AT&T ink an agreement to purchase 19 WCS licences from Sprint Corp; the concessions covered a number of locations across the South, including markets in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama and Georgia.

The number of distributed denial of service attacks using anonymous proxies has increased dramatically over the past year, according to a new research report, as attackers use these proxies to create an instant pseudo-botnet.

Ofer Gayer, security researcher at Redwood Shores, CA-based Incapsula Inc., said he first spotted the trend about a year ago.

Incapsula was working on creating a database of IP addresses spotted attempting malicious activity, and discovered that attackers were abusing anonymous proxies to turn a regular single-origin denial of service attack into a distributed denial of service attack with traffic flowing through thousands -- or tens of thousands -- different IP addresses.

A year ago, fewer than 5 percent of DDOS attacks came through anonymous proxies. Today, the number is close to 20 percent, Gayer said.

"The trend intensified over the past two months," Gayer said. "Currently, 20 percent of all application-layer attacks are originating from these proxy servers."

Of those, nearly 45 percent came from the TOR network of anonymous routers, and, of those, 60 percent used the TOR Hammer DoS tool.

On average, a single attacker would direct traffic from 1,800 different IP addresses, with 540,000 requests per instance.

According to Incapsula product evangelist Igal Zeifman, what this means is that an attacker could be sitting at home, on a single computer, and route traffic to a list of anonymous proxies to create an instant botnet-style attack.

All it takes is a proxy harvesting script and a publicly-available DOS toolkit.

Verizon this week proclaimed it's not particularly worried about efforts by Cablevision and Comcast to begin offering Wi-Fi calling services, insisting that the offers in no way seriously compete with the company's LTE offerings. Cablevision's $10 a month ($30 for non subscribers) Wi-Fi calling service doesn't feature cellular backup, making usefulness limited. Comcast's looming Wi-Fi calling effort, the pricing of which hasn't been released yet, will have some kind of cellular backup.

Still, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo doesn't think either of the options pose much of a threat to big red:

AT&T has won what could be a victory in Kentucky as Gov. Steve Beshear has signed a law that will limit a service provider's obligation to provide POTS service to consumers and businesses.

Under the new law, service providers that operate in the state will be able to discontinue offering traditional POTS services in urban areas if they can provide an alternative wireless-based service or VoIP.

However, service providers will still have to continue to provide POTS service for existing rural area customers, but not to new housing developments built in these areas.

According to a report in Louisville Business First, House Bill 152 passed on Feb. 24 by a vote of 71-25, while the Senate passed the SB 3 bill on March 2 by a 30-3 vote.

Hood Harris, president of AT&T Kentucky, previously told Louisville Business First that the bill would enable AT&T to more effectively invest in next-gen services because it would free up capital it has to dedicate today to maintain the legacy TDM-based voice service.

Add ITTA, which represents mid-sized telecoms/ISPs/video providers, to the list of associations--including the National Cable & Telecommunications Association--challenging the FCC's decision to triple the damages for violating federal program payment rules for Universal Service Fund and other fees.

The APA requires the FCC to give regulated entities notice about substantive changes. The groups argue the change (discussed in this FCC document (http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-issues-policy-statement-federal-payment-...)--a policy statement rather than a rule change voted on by the commission--was substantive and that notice was not provided, in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

In a filing late last week, ITTA said it was all for transparency about forfeiture standards, and agreed with the FCC that entities need to bear their fair share of federal programs, but it says it strongly agrees with NCTA and the others that it was an unlawful rule change without proper notice and comment under the APA.

ITTA also says the change is arbitrary and capricious--also an APA violation--because it does not assess forfeitures based on the circumstances in each case. "The one-size-fits all approach...would essentially function as a strict liability standard that does not take into account mitigating or aggravating factors" as required by the Communications Act.

Columbus, Ohio, lost in the much-hyped race to have Google install a hyper-fast broadband fiber system in town, but the city recently signed a contract that could help gain ultra-high-speed Internet service.

Such an upgrade allows the city, schools, libraries and hospitals to offer better and faster access to services online and over wireless devices. It also improves the quality of such service for businesses and individual customers.

Under the five-year contract, Connected Nation Exchange will develop a map for the city that shows where Columbus owns properties that can be used to expand broadband networks. Those properties include buildings, rooftops, towers, utility poles, signs, water tanks and existing fiber-optic lines, said Connected Nation Exchange CEO Brian Mefford.

The city already has installed 500 miles of fiber-optic lines, and the mapping will allow the city to more easily lease access to wireless companies. Such an arrangement also allows companies to provide ultra-high-speed service without making massive investment.

Wireless companies, including the largest players, such as AT&T and Verizon, need to find places where they can economically place new fiber, antennas and towers.

AT&T knows very well how expensive such updates can be. The company spent nearly $300 million from 2012 through 2014 to update its network in just the Columbus area, AT&T spokeswoman Sarah Briggs said.

Kansas City was very lucky to be the first city to get Google Fiber and we’re not talking just about the 1Gbps Internet service. NextCity has taken a look at some of the side benefits that Kansas City is reaping thanks to being the first Google Fiber city in America and they show just how great it can be to be the first major city in the U.S. to get a high-speed fiber network.

The most obvious thing Google Fiber has done for Kansas City is spur incumbents like AT&T to up their game and offer 1Gbps Internet services of their own. This competition is the envy of many cities around the U.S. that only have one choice when it comes to broadband providers, and none of those providers offer anything in the range of 1Gbps.

What’s more, NextCity says that “Cisco is setting up a public-private partnership effort linked to Kansas City’s coming 2.2-mile streetcar line” that “will be the largest Smart+Connected Communities venture in North America, using free public Wi-Fi, community information kiosks, and video camera sensors to gather and make use of an enormous amount of data.”

And finally, Kansas City gamers will get to benefit from an experimental computer gaming developed by Shinra Technologies, which announced at SXSW that it was attracted to Kansas City mostly because of its fiber infrastructure.

Be sure to check out NexCity’s full report on how Google Fiber is giving Kansas City a boost by clicking here.

For the past several months, Maine communities have been a hotbed of broadband activity. Bar Harbor, located midway along the state's Atlantic coast, is another community looking at fiber as a necessary investment.

According to a February article in the Mount Desert Islander, the town of 5,200 has decided to move forward with a feasibility study. The town received Internet access at no additional cost as part of its previous franchise agreement with Time Warner Cable. That agreement expired about a year ago and, as we have seen in other communities, the cable giant now appears to be holding out in order to charge for the same service. From the article:

“The guidance that we’ve received from the lawyers helping us … is that the cable company really doesn’t want to give us anything, and may in fact want to start charging us for the fiber network that we get today as part of that franchise agreement,” said Brian Booher. He is a member of the communications technology task force, which has studied the issue of broadband availability in Bar Harbor.

A similar situation in Martin County, Florida, inspired that community to build its own network. It is now saving millions, with no need to contend with typical Time Warner Cable hassles, price hikes, and poor service. Read more in our case study on Martin County [PDF].

A dozen households in rural Thurman, NY that for years endured unreliable or ultra-slow access to the Internet, now have high-speed, non-throttled broadband as the town’s innovative “white space” broadcast service was launched recently.

A number of Thurman residents reported this week that they are pleased with their new broadband access, provided by the town’s long-awaited white space project that calls for connecting up to 90 households in its first phase.

White-space broadband involves broadcasting data signals over unused electromagnetic frequencies between old analog television channels. The technology has been implemented successfully in Europe.

The public-private partnership, supported by a $200,000 state grant, has received national attention as a way to bring affordable, reliable Internet access to rural, sparsely settled communities across the nation.

The Thurman households now connected to white space broadband are located on South Johnsburg and Valley roads. The 12 subscribing households, connected several weeks ago, are paying $50 per month for the service, plus an up-front equipment charge of $292.

John Schroeter of Kenyontown is one of the new subscribers. For nearly 15 years, he’s endured dial-up service, which is one tiny fraction the speed of modern broadband.

“The white space service is truly amazing,” he said, noting that he uses the Internet a lot for genealogical research. “I can go from one web page to another without waiting forever,” he said noting that often web pages would fail to load, even after hours of waiting. “I can accomplish what would have been days of research in only an hour, right at home without traveling 15 miles.”

As Philadelphia faces its once-in-15-years franchise renewal talks with Comcast, you may be worried that city officials are just a little too cozy with Philly's 1st Corporate Citizen - a reasonable concern after I reported last week that the mayor's office has been sitting on a report likely to embarrass the company.

Well, here's one more reason to fret. Just as complaints about Comcast's customer-service flubs were boiling over publicly this winter, the company quietly won certification from the Federal Communications Commission that all four of its Philadelphia franchises were subject to "effective competition."

That designation - granted on Jan. 26 without challenge from the city - frees Comcast's franchises here from the last remnants of rate regulation: caps on charges for equipment and basic cable.

Effective competition? Before you stop laughing, here's something to bear in mind: The FCC's definition, adopted more than two decades ago after one of Congress' many zigzags on cable policy, may not measure up with yours or mine. Or, say, English.

For example, federal law says a cable company can claim that satellite services provide effective competition if they offer "comparable video programming" and serve at least 15 percent of a market's households.

This is where weak goes to laughable. Under a 1993 FCC rule, all the satellite service must offer to prove "comparable video programming" is a dozen channels, including at least one that's not broadcast television. DirecTV and Dish Network have long offered much more.

It’s not clear if the U.S. government is living up to its promise to disclose serious software flaws to technology companies, a policy it put in place five years ago, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The digital watchdog said on Monday it received a handful of heavily redacted documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which it sued last July after it and the National Security Agency moved too slowly on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Last year, the EFF sought documents related to the U.S. government’s efforts to beef up its Vulnerability Equities Process (VEP), a framework for notifying companies about zero-day vulnerabilities.

Those type of software flaws are considered the most dangerous since attackers are actively using the flaws to compromise computers, and there are no patches ready.

But there has been concern that the U.S. government may hold onto that kind of information for too long, putting at risk organizations that it is supposed to protect from foreign adversaries who may discover the vulnerabilities on their own.

The U.S. government has said it notifies companies of software flaws unless there is a compelling national security reason to withhold the information, such as to disrupt a planned terrorist attack, wrote Michael Daniel, cybersecurity coordinator and a special assistant to President Obama, in a blog post on the White House’s website last July.

The EFF’s FOIA request sought documents that showed how the U.S. had, as termed in Daniel’s blog post, “re-invigorated” the VEP. The results were “surprisingly meager,” wrote Andrew Crocker, a legal fellow with the EFF’s civil liberties team.

The most useful document the EFF received was from 2010 but only recounted a brief history of the VEP. Other documents were so heavily redacted that the EFF had a hard time parsing the content, Crocker wrote.

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